Obedience to Authority: Attitudes of Prison Officers in Stalinist Poland, 1944–1954

Abstract

In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944–1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroyed the personal value system of the prison staff. I study the behavior of wardens in a situation of constant pressure and ideological control. I ask who were the people who created the prison system in Poland and how the penal system absorbed and shaped them. I use documents from the collection of the Prison Management Department of the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Prison Administration of the Ministry of Interior. I confront the emerging picture of attitudes and behaviors of prison officers with behavioral models developed by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo based on their experiments conducted in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first section, I present the legal and organizational issues of the prison system and the recruitment process for its employees. Next, I present the scope of professional and ideological formation of new staff and analyze the consequences of such preparation for the functions of a prison officer. In the following paragraphs, I reflect on what strategies of discomfort repression did the officers in Stalinist penal institutions assume. Moreover, I consider the scope and sources of their violence toward prisoners.